# Improvements in Vagrant Provisioner: Request for Comments

**URL:** <https://forum.ansible.com/t/improvements-in-vagrant-provisioner-request-for-comments/12778>\
**Category:** Ansible Project\
**Tags:** ansible-project\
**Created:** [May 8, 2013, 5:11am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/improvements-in-vagrant-provisioner-request-for-comments/12778 "2013-05-08T05:11:43Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 7\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Michel\_Blanc1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/fbc32d/32.png) [@Michel\_Blanc1](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Michel_Blanc1)\
**Post date:** [May 8, 2013, 5:11am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/improvements-in-vagrant-provisioner-request-for-comments/12778/1 "2013-05-08T05:11:43Z")

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> Hi!

Salut Gilles,

Seems we have the beginning of a french Ansible User Group 😉

> Group 1 (mandatory):
> 
> &nbsp;&nbsp;\* --inventory-file: already available since vagrant 1.2.0  
> &nbsp;&nbsp;\* --limit: already available since vagrant 1.2.0  
> &nbsp;&nbsp;\* --sudo: already available since vagrant 1.2.0  
> &nbsp;&nbsp;\* --sudo-user: already available since vagrant 1.2.0  
> &nbsp;&nbsp;\* \*--tags\*: part of PR 1697. I vote for it!  
> &nbsp;&nbsp;\* \*--start-at-task\*: could make sense in a vagrant playground, anybody  
> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;vote for it?  
> &nbsp;&nbsp;\* \*--step\*: could make sense in a vagrant playground, anybody vote for it?  
> &nbsp;&nbsp;\* \*-v,-vv,-vvv: \*'-v' is available in vagrant 1.2.0. PR 1697 proposes  
> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;all verbosity levels. I vote for it!

I played all day long yesterday with Vagrant & Ansible and yes, tags and  
verbose are definitively missing, especially when it comes to debug  
playbooks.

I ended up runining long-winded ansible-playbook commands outside  
vagrant. While it's not really a problem, it would be much more  
convenient to have access to them in the Vagrantfile.

The other things that's missing I think it the ability to tell ansible  
the host name to use. I didn't really check but it seems ansible  
provisionner will use whatever IP it finds in the Vagrant config, or  
127.0.0.1 if none.

This is not very convenient IMHO. I prefer to use names when possible in  
inventories.

But may be I missed something though.

Thanks,

M

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**Author:** ![Gilles\_Cornu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/ecccb3/32.png) [@Gilles\_Cornu](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Gilles_Cornu)\
**Post date:** [May 8, 2013, 2:20pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/improvements-in-vagrant-provisioner-request-for-comments/12778/2 "2013-05-08T14:20:19Z")

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Salut Michel,

Thanks for your feedbacks. I’m not sure to understand well your question:

> The other things that’s missing I think it the ability to tell ansible  
> the host name to use. I didn’t really check but it seems ansible  
> provisionner will use whatever IP it finds in the Vagrant config, or  
> 127.0.0.1 if none.

Vagrant uses argument --inventory-file with “ansible.inventory\_file”. You should check there…

This make me think on following: There is no “control” by Vagrant to run ansible-playbook against VMs configured in Vagrantfile! It could be nice to add some sanity check: Ideally, Vagrant should parse ansible.inventory\_file, filter by ansible.limit and check if it maps with Vagrantfile host(s).

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**Author:** ![Michel\_Blanc1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/fbc32d/32.png) [@Michel\_Blanc1](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Michel_Blanc1)\
**Post date:** [May 8, 2013, 3:28pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/improvements-in-vagrant-provisioner-request-for-comments/12778/3 "2013-05-08T15:28:08Z")

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> Salut Michel,
> 
> Thanks for your feedbacks. I'm not sure to understand well your question:
> 
> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The other things that's missing I think it the ability to tell ansible  
> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;the host name to use. I didn't really check but it seems ansible  
> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;provisionner will use whatever IP it finds in the Vagrant config, or  
> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;127.0.0.1 if none.
> 
> Vagrant uses argument --inventory-file with "ansible.inventory\_file".  
> You should check there...

Yes sorry, I wasn't very clear or awake 🙂  
What I'm looking for is to use hostnames in inventory file without  
touching /etc/hosts or adding ansible\_ssh\_host in the inventory.

For instance (example trimmed down) :

```auto
Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.define :webapp do |webapp|
    webapp.vm.hostname = "webapp.local"
    webapp.vm.network :private_network, ip: "192.168.123.2"
  end

  config.vm.provision :ansible do |ansible|
    ansible.inventory_file = "vagrant/hosts"
  end
end

```

with the following vagrant/hosts :

```auto
webapp.local

```

AFAIK, this can't be done unless inventory is :

```auto
webapp.local ansible_ssh_host=192.168.123.2

```

which leads to repetition (changing the IP or networking style involves  
changing the inventory file).

It could be nice if hostname defined in webapp.vm.hostname to be mapped  
automatically to host IP.

In previous vagrant versions, vagrant-hostmaster could do this but it's  
not compatible with newer vagrant versions.

But there is an issue opened, and things are looking good and I don't  
think it worth it to do something on the provisionner side (at first  
sight it would be quite hairy to do).

However, the same apply to ansible\_ssh\_port if port 22 if forwarded in  
the configuration.

May be an option to generate an inventory file with the proper  
hostnames, ansible\_ssh\_host, ansible\_ssh\_port could be nice and would  
solve all this for simple setups.

> This make me think on following: There is no "control" by Vagrant to run  
> ansible-playbook against VMs configured in Vagrantfile! It could be nice  
> to add some sanity check: Ideally, Vagrant should parse  
> ansible.inventory\_file, filter by ansible.limit and check if it maps  
> with Vagrantfile host(s).

This is probably an ansible provisionner's responsability more than a  
Vagrant one no ?

May be checking that the output of `ansible-playbook --list-hosts  
--limit "#{config.limit}"` and checking that union with Vagrantfile  
host(s) isn't nil could be enough ?

M

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**Author:** ![Brian\_Coca1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/278dde/32.png) [@Brian\_Coca1](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Brian_Coca1)\
**Post date:** [May 8, 2013, 3:48pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/improvements-in-vagrant-provisioner-request-for-comments/12778/4 "2013-05-08T15:48:16Z")

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does a vagrant inventory plugin make sense? it should dynamically set  
ansible\_ssh\_host could even add new hosts as they become available.

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**Author:** ![Gilles\_Cornu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/ecccb3/32.png) [@Gilles\_Cornu](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Gilles_Cornu)\
**Post date:** [May 10, 2013, 8:02am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/improvements-in-vagrant-provisioner-request-for-comments/12778/5 "2013-05-10T08:02:14Z")

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Thanks Michel and Brian for updates!

I like these DRY wishes 🙂 I therefore started to work on a separate vagrant add-on request, with following idea:

**Ability to auto-generate a temporary ansible inventory based on Vagrantfile definitions**. My prototype works well, even for multi-machine mode. For each machine to be provisioned, the temporary inventory file would look like following:

```auto

[db]
127.0.0.1:2201

```

based on this template

```auto

[<%= group_name %>]
<%= ssh_host %>:<%= ssh_port %>

```

We also could organize the template to get following result:

```auto
[db]
db-hostname ansible_ssh_host=127.0.0.1 ansible_ssh_port=2201

```

But I don’t see any advantage for the second variant… did I miss something?

Notes / Open Questions:

- ansible-playbook will thus ssh-connect via the same localhost-portmapping channel as `vagrant ssh` itself.
- Trying to reduce total number of options for Ansible Provisioner in Vagrant, I think that following configuration logic is handy:
- auto-generate ansible inventory file unless `ansible.inventory_file` is specified in Vagrantfile- About the choice for the [group name], I rely on the vagrant machine name, leading to following values:
- ‘default’ in single-machine mode
- machine name in multi-machine mode (e.g. ‘db’ if `config.vm.define :db do |db| ...`)- Optional Vagrant settings like `vm.hostname` (only used to set vm hostname, i guess) or additional private network interfaces `vm.network :private_network, ip:...` are not considered and won’t be used in “auto” mode.

What do you think? Thank you in advance for review. I’ll try to clean my prototype code in order to submit this request this week-end…

@Michel: I like `ansible-playbook --list-hosts --limit "#{config.limit}"` sanity check too, which makes sense when using an ‘unsafe’ `ansible.inventory_file`. All possible SSH connections should be thus checked (127.0.0.1:2200, 192.168.123.2:22, …)… I won’t include this point for now, but it could come in a next step… is there any vote on it? or overkill stuff?

Gilles

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![James\_Martin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/f14d63/32.png) [@James\_Martin](https://forum.ansible.com/u/James_Martin)\
**Post date:** [May 10, 2013, 10:22pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/improvements-in-vagrant-provisioner-request-for-comments/12778/6 "2013-05-10T22:22:46Z")

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All these ideas sound great. I've just started playing with the  
ansible provisioner for Vagrant. One feature I'd like to see (and  
maybe it's there already and I can't figure it out) is the ability to  
launch a playbook \_after\_ all of the hosts are up. That way you get  
the benefit of parallel provisioning goodness of ansible and the  
ability for the hosts to interact with each other during the playbook  
runs. This happens frequently for me when dealing with clustered  
systems.

- James

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Gilles\_Cornu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/ecccb3/32.png) [@Gilles\_Cornu](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Gilles_Cornu)\
**Post date:** [May 13, 2013, 11:25am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/improvements-in-vagrant-provisioner-request-for-comments/12778/7 "2013-05-13T11:25:47Z")

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Add-on “auto-generated inventory\_file from Vagrantfile” proposed in [https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/pull/1723](https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/pull/1723) (I finally drop the wrong idea define a ‘group’, but just create a single line with hostname and ssh connection data). `hosts` fields in playbooks must either be set to `all` or correspond to vagrant machine names (`default` in single-machine mode).

RE James:I think that (at the moment) ansible awesome parallel-provisioning does not fit with multi-machine mode in vagrant (vagrant makes a provisioner call for each managed machine). Your “after all” feature sounds like a possible general feature request to vagrant (that makes sense independently of the provisioner in use: ansible, chef, …). But I think you can do the trick quite easily with something like:

`vagrant up && ansible-playbook --tags=after_all site.yml`